Into the Dark
by The Elusive Author
Summary: He was the consulting detective, she was the accomplice to a string of grisly murders. He was light, she was dark. Life and death hung on the edge of a knife clutched in her bloodstained hands, pulled from the corpse of a prostitute, and all he could say was "why are you doing this?" - Warning: violent death, grisly scenes, and rape. Very dark fic, in other words.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note: **Oh look, now it's a Sherlock fanfiction as well, is it? Well, hold on. I don't normally do well with detective stories, but how I do enjoy reading them.

This is not Johnlock, just so the fandom knows. It's not Sherlene really, either (I like the ship name 'Sherlene' more than I like 'Adlock'). Maybe it is. Probably.

To be remembered: this story is a random thing on the side and will be updated when I have the time and motivation.

* * *

**Chapter One.**

"You're using my laptop again."

"Mine was in my bag. I had to make do with yours."

"Your bag is right _next _to you-"

"I could hardly waste my time pulling it out and powering it up when yours is right here, now could I?"

Exasperation tinged the voice of the doctor, John Watson, as he slumped his shoulders and shook his head with a muttered epithet. A glance out of the corner of the angled eyes of the consultant, Sherlock Holmes, told him that the good doctor had decided to relinquish his case for an argument and had decided that the man-child on the couch wasn't worth wasting his time on. Yet.

He returned to the computer screen, hardly blinking as his sea-foam eyes took in lines of information. He could hear John rummaging in the fridge. His curiosity for what the doctor was looking for was slight. There were pressing things on his mind already and he couldn't bear to waste his time eating and drinking when there was the prospect of a case on his mind. He could hear his flatmate gathering some things to make a dish out of and remembered- "Dishes are in the wash, John. Mrs Hudson put them in."

John murmured an affirmation and the audible sound of the dish washer opening, and then closing again, could be heard most audibly.

"Sherlock," John said. "Why is there a gun in the dish washer?"

"I must have forgotten it there," Sherlock responded almost automatically. Had he left the gun in the wash? He straightened the collar of his shirt and looked towards the kitchen. "Is there blood in the wash?"

"Blood... in the wash?" John repeated the question. If Sherlock had been able to see him clearly he might have seen the _'oh please don't say there is actually blood in the bloody dish washer_' expression on John's face. He could hear the dish washer open again. The doctor appeared, in plain sight, suddenly.

"Sherlock, there is blood in the dish washer."

Sherlock Holmes smiled.

"Excellent," he said.

* * *

Prostitutes had little rights when it came down to the bare facts. They were there for show, or if not, for pleasure. They served their pimps, danced the lines of fate when it came to diseases and pregnancy and death and rape, but even when one fell there was another to rise in her place and continue the movement.

Prostitution had a way of stripping women of their dignity and identities and made them nothing more than walking cunts waiting for the right cock to buy them for the night. They were objectified, even by the authorities, and so often ignored in favour of hunting down something else that made more sense. It was commonly perceived that the prostitutes were there because they wanted to be, but there were those that were so heavily drugged into a stupor that they didn't even know where they were half the time, or others that bore the marks of punishment on their skin for daring to walk away when they were supposed to be attending the corners and alleys.

They were willing only so long as to get away from their habitations. The barest taste of luxury sustained them sometimes, until it was torn away and they were cast back out to the streets to do it again.

By the time they made it through a year of service to hungry men and women, they were no longer the women they were before. Girls were whores, young ladies were sluts, and their legs were always expected to be open. Ready.

She had long since lost the desire to be disgusted by the sight of women lewdly presenting their rears for the appreciation of their next client. She went through the motions dutifully, though, as she allowed herself to be fondled and caressed. Her skin crawled under warm hands that pulled at her bodice and pried away the scrap of cloth she attempted to wear as panties. She could feel fetid breath on her thighs, thick fingers exploring, and wanted to vomit.

She had been called Cassandra once by parents so in love with the work that they forgot they had a daughter until it was too late and she had disappeared into a cold London night. Now she was Cassie, the slut that pranced the corners in barely-there skirts and halter tops even on the blustery days that stripped her skin and made her miserable.

She was nothing more than their sex doll now and would be regarded as nothing else.

She felt the penetration and jerked feebly as the man that mounted her buried himself in her body. He was too hard, too deep, too fast. She had not cried out in pain since the day they stripped her of her innocence, but now as the man riding her plunged in and out, she cried for relief from the agony.

Her cry was answered when something broke and tore inside of her, releasing blood from the deepest parts of her feminity, and wailed a final cry of dissolute loss.

She had forgotten the faces of her parents long ago, but as the black of death settled over her body and stilled her rampant heart, she remembered the faces of happy families she had seen over the long years she served the men of the city.

As the man pulled out of her and waved in front of her some strange phallic object, as though in mockery of her dying moments, a tear escaped the corner of her eye. Blood sprinkled her face, scented with arousal and pain, and she closed her eyes. It felt like hot rain. Even as she died, it felt like hot rain.

* * *

"You expect me to clean this mess?" Andy was a young woman, slender and graceful and demure, but the green eyes sparked with fury beneath her tangle of black hair. She stood next to the man as he wiped off the murderous dildo in the pleated skirt the girl laying on the bed had so wrongfully donned. He enjoyed his girls in skirts. "You've gotten blood on the fucking ceiling. How the fuck am I supposed to deal with that?"

"You'll manage," he said.

She nodded and began to circle the room as the man jerked down his pants, his briefs, and joined with the woman he had killed. The sounds of sex were disgusting as Andy circled the bed, trying her best to not watch him as he fucked the corpse. She tried to not hear the moans and the creaking and the slapping of flesh against flesh as she faced the window overlooking the street and stared down.

"Do you think they will bite?" Andy asked quietly as she stared out the window. Her breath fogged the glass. She could hear the moans increasing in volume as he neared his climax. The jolting of the bed against the wall was audible and Andy hoped, most fervently, that the neighbours were too busy to hear. She did not look forward to being arrested for her presence in a room while a fucking murderer had his way with a corpse. It was bad enough that she had to clean the body and the room without getting caught or else she would serve the same purpose as the prostitute.

His climax was surprisingly quiet compared to the sounds he had been making previously. She had been present enough times that she had grown accustom to the many nuances he suffered. She was there to help him pick his prey, to doll them up, to drug them until they had lost their minds, and then she was there to clean up after him. As others had before her, she served this man as his personal manservant. She was guilty by association and when she turned to look at him and his dead whore, she wondered if it would be her on that bed one day when she was past her time as his assistant.

"Does it matter at this point?" The man said as he slipped off the woman. Andy's disgust was masked behind a careful facade as she saw the semen and blood on his dick. There were many things she would like to do to this man but for his disgusting habit alone she would be sure he suffered the most heinous of punishments.

If she ever lived long enough.

"It does if you do want to go through with it," she responded. He redressed himself, not even bothering to clean himself off, and she approached the bed as he stepped away to observe the body. Unslinging her bag from her arm, she donned a pair of rubber gloves as she began to work on the corpse. "Can you send in Nathaniel?"

Soon enough, a hulking man had joined Andy and her employer. He was quiet, as most large men seemed to be, but Andy considered him something of her only actual friend. He did the lifting and she did the cleaning.

"Move her to the bathroom. I suspect the curtain is still down from earlier today. Put her in the tub and start the wash. The bleach is here."

She tossed an unlabeled water bottle to the man and he caught it neatly before doing as she requested. She removed a second bottle, and a couple other mysterious chemicals, from her bag before beginning to strip the bed.

"Let me know when you are done," the man said.

"As always," Andy replied.

* * *

She didn't know when it was that she had come to be under the care of Lindsay and Marcus Prince. Once, she knew she had belonged to others, was a daughter to another family, and a sister to two young boys that were always too busy to play her games.

She didn't know when it was that she had lost her first name and had been given the name Andromeda so she could cope with life without need to be concerned for not knowing who she was. Her new brothers and sisters were similarly named. Capricorn and Aquarius and Chameleon and Eridanus and Leo.

She was the one that was chosen by the man.

Small and sharp, all angles and planes, she had suited the man's need for female assistance while also maintaining a casually androgynous appearance so as to not bring rise to his lust.

She came to him at a young age, still not done with her rebellious teens, and he molded her into what she was today.

His personal cleaning lady. His assistant and accomplice. His dealer.

She was given the best, but he always held the threat over her head that if she should refuse him or fail him, he would make her die in a way that she had never seen.

It was why, as she performed miracles to clean the room, she was without feeling. It was why, as she assisted Nathaniel in cleaning the corpse of semen and blood, she was not actually seeing.

And when they wrapped the small girl that was no older than fourteen in the opaque shower curtain before taking her down the fire escape and dumping her into the garbage, she did not have the desire to run or report the crime.

The police wouldn't be able to protect her, she had always been told this. It was ingrained now, her compliance.

As she coped later with a joint, she knew she was as fucked as that girl she had dumped.

* * *

**Author's Footnote: **So, stuff comes later. Other stuff will be explained eventually. Where does Sherlock and Watson come in? I don't know.


	2. Chapter 2

**Author's Note: **Try not to judge me too harshly, now.

* * *

**Chapter two.**

Andy's appearances in London were normally mundane and unmarked by instances of crime and other dangerous occurrences. She sipped lattés in the Starbucks, watched people feed pigeons in the park, and smiled indulgently at the children toted around on the shoulders of their parents. Sometimes she even carried with her a book that she took along to write in as she watched the citizens of the city participate in their boring, mundane little worlds.

She was never in leisure despite the way she conducted herself, even while picking up things from the grocer's to be delivered back to the flat. She couldn't afford to be weary and relaxed and perhaps it showed in the way she carried herself and dressed herself every day. Maybe the tense fingers that knotted her scarf did so in a way that bespoke her inward wariness. She would never know, would never actually see the signs.

She was usually too busy to try with anything of the sort.

Whenever she wrote, she wrote about the people she saw every day. The women and children in particular, for it was in them that she was allotted any value herself. Their lives for hers, that was the wordless arrangement.

_Female, eighteen years of age, single._

_Male, four years of age, two siblings both sexes._

_Toddler, unidentified sex, only child._

_Female, three years of age, only child._

_Female, twenty years of age, two daughters, single._

Her observances took her through her petty errands when she ran them. Her book was filled with these scribbles, these incomplete sentences that would have probably driven any grammatically sound person insane.

As she dropped her groceries into the small kitchen of her flat and began to unload them, it became easy for her to slip into the multifold faces she had seen so she might wonder what it was like to live _their _lives one day, free from the threat of harm and death and without the burden of wasted life like red ink in their skin. She hated them sometimes, those happy couples and those laughing children. Sometimes she did not deny her regret at not being able to relieve them of their lives herself. They were happy when she was not, safe when she was not, and she was leading them inexorably to their deaths while she was beneath the metaphorical guillotine. They had the benefit of peace after they died the way they did. She did not rest easily even after her duties were done.

"Did you observe anyone of importance today?" His voice was low, dark. He sounded intoxicated. Without looking, she worked the book from her pocket and tossed it to the table before returning to unloading the perishables.

She could hear him picking up the book and beginning to flip through.

Silence passed between them as she softly closed the cupboard and moved to join him at her table, finally taking him in with her eyes.

The man dressed impeccably, was groomed so perfectly that she suspected not a hair was out of place on his large head. He must have just returned from work, she decided as she looked at him, noting the small nuances stress granted him. It must have been a hard day as well.

"The child, the girl on the third page, I want you to have Lorraine keep an eye on her."

Andy nodded and accepted her book back, making the mental note to contact Lorraine and make the order.

"Have you heard anything yet, though?" He asked her after some tense moments. She returned to looking at him, having not realised she had slanted her eyes away, and idly tapped her fingers against the table.

"They suspect a rapist murderer, but so far nothing concrete."

He did not read the papers. She did as she drank her tea in the morning before leaving.

"No bites, though. Either he is more secure in his intelligence than we think he is or he hasn't yet found us worth his interest, however I am sure he will come around eventually."

The man nodded. He stared at Andy for a long time, unblinkingly, and she wanted to flinch and disappear into the hard back of her chair. She fancied seeing something dark creeping behind the placid shade of grey his eyes bore, but in a moment it was gone.

"I'll be upstairs," he told her as he rose from his chair. "Remember to contact Lorraine."

Andy nodded.

The door closed with a note of finality that allowed her some semblance of relaxation.

* * *

"There have been five murders this past month, Sherlock," Inspector Lestrade was a patient man, usually, but as he stood before the obtuse man he often cursed himself for consulting, he spoke with a tone of biting impatience. "Rapes, all of them."

"Serial rapist who murders his victim? Lestrade, it's like you don't even know me at all," Sherlock replied. He didn't even have to look up from his microscope.

The exasperation was evident in every movement Lestrade made. His weariness, his worry. It was all there for the piercing eyes of Sherlock Holmes to see even while using his peripherals. Sherlock snorted.

"Let me guess. The murderer is cleaning his corpses with bleach, judging by the vaporising odour wafting off your clothes. He likely wraps his victims in plastic, typically garbage bags, but this last one was something different, something unexpected. You've found the crime scene but can't find any trace of blood, which unsettles you because the manner in which the latest victim died is violent and there should be more blood than you've found. My guess is that the murderer also cleaned up the room using the same batch of chemicals used to clean up his victim. Unlike the previous four he dumped her corpse in a public location, likely in an alley or park. Prostitute, of course, and currently unidentified, yes?"

Lestrade shared a look with John Watson, something like sympathy passing between both men, before Lestrade returned his attention to Sherlock.

"Are you going to take the case or not?" He asked.

Sherlock didn't even need to skip a beat as he stood and donned his coat.

"What kind of person would I be if I said 'no'?" He asked.

To Inspector Greg Lestrade, many different words came up in his mind that would define the man.

* * *

The building was nondescript. The neighbourhood was quiet. Tenants from other rooms in the motel were lingering beyond the line of police tape that warned them not to cross. Sherlock crossed, lifting the tape for his shorter companion, and they entered the crime scene.

"What you doing here, freak?" Donovan was, as she usually made herself out to be, customarily bitchy once she spotted the lissome man bound in his long coat and scarf followed by his smaller grumpkin of an assistant.

"As always, Donovan, I was invited," Sherlock's response was casually delivered. He did not respond to the antagonising in any way that could be deemed petty if he could avoid it. His retorts were always well placed, well founded, and disguised under the label of 'observations'. "Stayed out all night again, did you?"

Donovan looked at John as though he were even lesser in her eyes than Sherlock for following the man around.

"Serial rapist a bit too tame for you though, innit?" Donovan asked, continuing with the tone of antagonisation as she returned her gaze to Sherlock. "Like a little more variety, don't you?"

"Come along, John. I'm sure Sally has something better to do with her time. Maybe she'd like to go and spend the rest of the evening with Anderson?"

Something about the way he said it set Donovan on edge, but she scoffed. She might have made more disparaging remarks but Lestrade suddenly came into view, perhaps sensing disarray, and beckoned Sherlock and John through.

* * *

"So, this is where he comes from."

"Kind of a bit too conspicuous, innit?"

"Not... so much, no."

Andy and Ric stared up at the door to 221B Baker Street through matching green eyes. They were siblings before they were taken, they knew this much about eachother, but different paths led them to different lives. It was her contracting his assistance that found him standing beside her for the first time in years. His name was Capricorn now, as hers was Andromeda, and they were merely here because this was what they were paid to do.

"Are they really out?" Andy asked Ric. They were ignored, largely, by the people that busied themselves passing back and forth on the sidewalk. They looked like siblings, like a brother showing his sister around, and they worked with that.

"Both of them left about half an hour ago. I suspect they have a new case," Ric responded.

Andy felt a tremulous beat of worry in her heart although she knew she shouldn't have. This was what he wanted. He wanted the attention of Sherlock Holmes and his doctor associate, John Watson. Andy didn't know if that would end up being a good thing or not.

"Get us in," she said to Ric, something of a troubled smile on her face.

The landlady was not much of a problem when they banged on the knocker and she opened the door. Ric typically charmed women into doing what he wanted, but as he smiled at the old lady he lunged forward and into the house, allowing Andy inside after him. She beckoned to the idle car waiting across the street and another woman slid out, dressed as classy as a svelte woman of money and privilege should be. Her heels clicked as she entered, closing the door behind her.

"Put her to sleep, Ric. Up in C should do, I think."

Ric nodded and Andy allowed the woman to follow him up the stairs before trailing after her as well. The flat they were seeking was unlocked, perhaps because the occupants didn't expect somebody to enter while they were gone. The woman opened the door, it creaked on its hinges, and Andy was presented the sight of a somewhat well-furnished apartment spread before her. She entered after the woman, unslinging her purse and pulling out a pair of gloves. The woman didn't take any.

"Get the violin there, the nicotine patches there, and that cushion there," the woman pointed to the objects she named. Andy followed her directions, withdrawing plastic bags from her purse so she may stuff the objects into them and preserve them as best as she could. The violin she left in its case. She wouldn't admit it, but the instrument was dear to her. She remembered when she was allowed to play the cello as well.

The lady was in the kitchen when Andy returned from dropping the items off in the car. Ric was there as well, rifling through some papers on the table. Andy went to the bedroom but, upon finding that it showed signs of sparse habitation, she quickly decided not to search there.

"The doctor lives upstairs," the lady said.

"There wouldn't be anything of import there," Andy replied as she began her own search in the kitchen. "It's not the doctor he wants information on, it's the freak."

She opened the fridge and for a few moments just stared.

"There's also a gun in the dish washer," Ric said as he joined Andy, reaching forward to pluck the sealed jar off the shelf. The hand in the water swished unpleasantly and Andy scowled. "Disgusting, eh? Think what he must do to his _victims_." He wiggled his fingers as though to suggest something creepy. Andy smirked and nudged him with her elbow.

They were still siblings, in their own way.

"Done yet?"

Both of them started and looked to the lady. She stared at them as though accusing them of not taking their jobs seriously. Andy's smile died and she sobered up fast enough to return to her business-like attitude.

"Take it with us. And the gun," she told Ric. "Anything else we would need?"

"That should do it," the lady said. She smiled, satisfied. "Out we go, before he gets home."

Andy knew he would realise his lair had been invaded as soon as he entered his home, so they did not tidy up. He was an intelligent person, the doctor's blog had said it all.

She hoped the man was up to the challenge.

* * *

"Judging by the lack of injuries to the major locations most murderers choose, I'm curious as to the manner in which she died," Sherlock's first words were dispassionate and evenly delivered. He took his time approaching the body they had laid out in the alley. Stains coated the skirt and shirt the girl wore, as did blood, but the lack of wounds was what initially startled Sherlock. It took one look at Lestrade for Sherlock to know he was right. "So? How did she die?"

"Torn apart from the inside from what we've been able to see. You'll find blood in her skirt beneath her." Lestrade nodded. John looked sick.

"You're saying he _knifed _her..." he had to pause for a moment, letting his words sink in. Sherlock was leaning over the girl, his small pocket magnifying glass in hand.

"He mutilated her body in the hopes of covering up his tracks, perhaps," Sherlock said. "The brutality suggests he did not know the woman and did not care to not cause her pain. She was unwilling when she died, you can see the tear trails down either side of her face which suggests she was also laying on her back when it happened." He reached for one of her slender arms, lifting it and observing it before laying it back down surprisingly gentle. "She struggled, was restrained and then administered something to make her compliant. Perhaps a painkiller. No, not that."

He could see where she had been picking at her nails, the scratches surprisingly fresh, and moved on.

"She doesn't come from this area, judging by the state of her feet and ankles. She walked quite a distance, last night or earlier today, before being picked up by her murderer. You can see where she has been hit by water from the rain as she walked up her left side, suggesting she came down the right hand side of the block. Prostitute, obviously, so no identification. Drugged when she arrived, murdered not long after that, and then judging by the state of the post-mortem bruising on her thighs, she was raped soon after. You can smell the bleach they used to clean her, did they also use bleach to erase the evidence inside?"

"We'll find that out when we get her to an autopsy," Lestrade said.

Sherlock nodded and stood up, moving sinuously as he removed his gloves. There wasn't an ounce of pity in the eyes that looked down at the crumpled girl, merely a clinical sort of detachment that objectified her as evidence.

She might have wept if she had known the only person who could solve her death was one of the people that would not understand why she had to die.

"Did you find the room she came from?" Sherlock asked.

"Yes, follow me."

* * *

The room was as remarkably clean as the corpse, although the traces of cleaning were far more obvious. The scent of chemicals weighed down on John as he entered the room, making him want to gag. The bed was haphazard, obviously left unmade, and it was soon shown that the bedding had been left in the bathtub in a wash of the very chemicals whose scent pervaded the room, and likely every room on the level.

"John, what do you think?" Sherlock stood next to him, almost intimately close, so as to ensure their words would go largely unheard. "Murder?"

"Most foul," John replied.

Sherlock smiled out of the corner of his mouth briefly before carefully erasing it before the eyes of the detectives noted it. Everybody was suspicious of him enough.

"Anything you'd appreciate sharing with us, Sherlock?" Lestrade said. The forensic team were trying to look like they were ignoring the two non-police present and failing, even to John's untrained eye.

Sherlock looked at him, a devilish twinkle in his eye, before returning his interest to the scene, circling the room almost meaninglessly before stopping every so often to investigate a speck on the wall or a hair on the pillow.

"Whoever cleaned was relatively skilled," he said. "Practiced, even." He craned his head to look at the ceiling. "However the girl died, and I'd say for certain that they used a long weapon, it was done messily enough to have blood left on the ceiling. Washed off, of course, in the same solution as the body and bedding. Nothing with the walls but for handprints left from former tenants, although I'd still run them. She died on this bed, though, almost dead center. You can see where the largest stain of blood was from the wounds she suffered offcenter near the bottom. The murderer, though, still had his clothes on when he took his victim. You can see the blood spatter from his dismount and when he redressed, meaning there was blood on his trousers. Handprints, evidently bloody, mark the mattress, but they are distinctly feminine suggesting the murderer is a woman or that the one who cleaned up was a woman. The latter is most likely due to the presence of the same prints on other surfaces that have been cleaned, and the bruising on the woman's wrists which tells us that she also lifted the victim."

"You got all that just now?" Lestrade sounded a little more surprised than usual. John had, of course, fallen into obscurity to everyone else, easily forgotten in the moment as Sherlock deduced his observations to the amusement and awe of everyone present.

"It's there for you to see if you look hard enough," Sherlock said.


End file.
